No More The Book Is Better

I‘m going to make a vow right now to never again say in print or in conversation the words: “The book is better.”

Not because the book isn’t better, not because I don’t think the book is better in many cases, and not because I don’t think it’s ever valuable to compare a film adaptation with its literary original. But because the statement “The book is better” is too easy a gut reaction, too simplistic a critical statement, and too cliched a response. It doubles as an elitist phrase, both revealing that you’ve read the book in question and that you, being literary, prefer it to its pop-art cousin the cinema. Now, of course not everyone who uses the phrase intends those elitist connotations and I don’t mean to suggest that they do.

Instead, when dealing with a film adaptation of a book, I will seek to compare how they differ, what specific things the book did better, and what specific things the film did better. Sometimes I can’t be that specific, because the difference is more ephemeral than that, but I will be specific about that, too, as specific as I can.

I already try to do this, recognizing that the film, though based on an existing work, is also its own work of art and ought to be treated as such rather than merely a copy/shadow of the original. But I will make it explicit. Hold me to this. If any time after today, you hear me say the words “The book is better” or see me write them, call me on it. Remind me to think more carefully about the relationship between the two works, and tell me to rewrite or expand what I wrote.

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I agree with every point you’ve made (though having been kind enough to read my comparable blog piece I’m sure you know this!). I find “The book is better” as useless a response as “FTW” or “Fail,” neither of which actually means anything. It is greatly disappointing to me to try to have a discussion when that’s the extent of thought the other person/people have given the subject matter. And I’ll add that I resent being told I think “too much” about things; why is it I can’t accuse others of thinking too little?

Yeah, it’s just one of those responses/reactions that people, especially people who ought to know better (i.e., literate people who have read the books and ought to be able to form articulate and reasoned statements about the relationship between a film and its source), throw around almost automatically. I’ve done it myself, usually when pressed to evaluate something when I don’t really feel like going into it for whatever reason – but that’s what I want to stop. If it’s worth talking about, it’s worth talking about well and not dismissing with a rote answer like “the book is better.”

And yep, after reading your post, I think we’re pretty much on the same page (no pun intended)!

Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”